[steveklabnik]

  >  I wonder whether they would be happy to accept changes to their error messages?

We have a special tag just for this in the issue tracker, and care a lot about diagnostics. Please report confusing errors if you see them, and patches are even better.

People seem to be _really_ split about Rust's current errors: I've heard, in the same day, "Rust has the worst error messages" and "Rust has the best error messages". Trying to figure out how to get the former camp into the latter.

[kbenson]

> I've heard, in the same day, "Rust has the worst error messages" and "Rust has the best error messages".

Which probably means there's a steep learning curve to them, but they are really useful and informative after that initial learning period is over. If so, tread carefully lest you ruin the latter by catering to much to the former problem.

[smt88]

Is it possible to have error messages that work for everyone? Is there a fundamental difference between what the former group want out of an error message and what the latter group want?

[steveklabnik]

That's what I am trying to figure out. I have a hunch that it may be correlated with language background.

That's usually why I'm always asking for specifics when people make general complaints, I'm trying to dig into the _why_. "Error messages are bad" isn't actionable; "error messages are bad because" often is. This thread was already getting into specifics before I woke up, though :)